We expect some hypocrisy in politics, but it was still jaw-dropping to behold Republicans accusing President Obama of politicizing the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Wasn't it just eight years ago that the GOP organized an entire presidential campaign around the attacks of 9/11, and George W. Bush's response to them?

I’m a 65-year-old African American. I was excited enough by the election of the nation’s first black president that I would have cut him a thousand miles of slack. But the last thing I expected was that I would watch him meekly accept humiliation by his political opponents. And the second last thing I expected was that I would go into 2012 looking at the upcoming presidential election as a lesser-of-two-evils affair.

Is the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 constitutional?

It was not supposed to end this way. Although President Barack Obama deserves credit for bringing an end to the war in Iraq that he inherited, if he had had his wishes, thousands of U.S. troops would nevertheless have remained stationed in Iraq indefinitely.

Habeas corpus, secret courts & Gitmo

Will emerging democracies produce new tyrannies?

The Afghan government's order a week ago to the U.S. to close its prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where it holds unidentified prisoners, came as a shock to Washington, although President Karzai has before asked the U.S. to cease operations because of what he considered infringements upon Afghan sovereignty.

Should Obama have signed the National Defense Authorization Act?

Should the president of the United States be able to authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world without telling the public why—or even acknowledging that he has done so? The question is not theoretical. On September 30 a missile fired from an unmanned drone aircraft operated by the CIA killed two American citizens in Yemen.

It might seem odd to apply the term “understated” to a documentary that features gritty combat footage. But a quiet, poignant restraint is a key note of Hidden Battles, a graceful study of how the act of killing affects soldiers’ mental health.

Ten years after the terrible devastation of September 11, we live in sacred time. All time is sacred, the imprint of a timeless, eternal God—the traces of God’s mysterious presence in the toil and stress, the joy and struggle of history.

When former President George W. Bush joins President Barack Obama at “Ground Zero” in lower Manhattan on September 11 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, the nation will be reminded, if only for a few hours, that the preservation of democracy requires real sacrifices and the willing embrace of duties, not just the pursuit of private interests and freedoms.

Remembering 9/11

Befitting its subject, The Longest War is a very long book, a comprehensive examination of the struggle that began slowly and surreptitiously in the early 1990s and continued—at least until Osama bin Laden’s killing.

Undoubtedly, in the killing of Osama bin Laden, a certain kind of justice was done, and the relief and satisfaction felt by many of the families of those murdered at bin Laden’s direction cannot be denied. Yet questions about the circumstances of bin Laden’s death remain.

There was much in Obama’s speech announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden—and in the scenes of chanting and jubilant flag-waving across the country that followed—that ought to give Christians, and not only pacifists such as myself, great pause.

Who is Obama? Now we know

Whatever one’s political commitments, facing the question of Iraqi civilian deaths as honestly and objectively as possible is both an intellectual and a moral imperative.

What's our end game in Afghanistan?

Let us contemplate the joys of being in the political opposition when unemployment in your state tops 10 percent. 

General McChrystal gets out just in time

Why Washington's conventional wisdom of impending Democratic catastrophe is one of the best things Obama's party has going for it.

The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at the moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.